Introducing VIC, your AI mayor

Victor Miller isn’t your typical mayoral candidate. Running for mayor of Cheyenne, the capital of Wyoming, Mill has pledged to turn executive decision-making responsibilities over to an AI bot called VIC he created on ChatGPT. Miller told Wired magazine that he’ll merely serve as VIC’s “meat puppet.”

State rules wouldn’t let Miller register VIC’s candidate solely as VIC — which stands for Virtual Integrated Citizen — so Miller himself had to be the named candidate on the ballot. Wyoming’s Secretary of State Chuck Gray said he is monitoring this candidacy very closely and noted that “an AI bot is not a qualified elector” under state law.

Whether Miller — or VIC — will be able to remain on the ballot is an open question that tests the limit of state elections laws, an edge case for the AI era that, if Miller has his way, might not seem so strange in a few years.

While officials aren’t usually keen to take orders from a machine, we are starting to see governments use the technology to boost efficiency. The British government, for example, has started a pilot program using AI to streamline its work. So, elected or not, AI is coming to bureaucracies.